well, I stumbled around plenty when I first moved to Paris. Might have gotten into real trouble if a few people hadn’t offered a hand. Anyway…” He turned away, started pouring steaming water into pottery mugs. “Did he hurt you?”
She blinked. His tone was so casual that she almost missed it, but then Will wasn’t an in-your-face kind of caretaker. Instead he was subtle, found a way to slip in a disturbing question and get it out of the way. Most strangers wouldn’t have cared, much less made the effort to steer into a potentially awkward problem.
She thought that just maybe her attraction to him was more than ordinary old sex appeal. Damned if he wasn’t coming through like a seriously good guy.
And then she tried to answer the question. “I’m bound to have a few bruises show up tomorrow, maybe even a nasty one on my neck. But I don’t need a doctor. Nothing serious.” Yet suddenly she needed to snug her arms tight under her chest. “I have to admit, though, that I keep feeling…weird. I was never mugged before, never had anyone touch me with the intent to hurt me. I can’t seem to shake it off. There’s just a high…ick…factor.”
“Sit. I was going to make coffee, then figured that was stupid. You need caffeine like a hole in the head. So it’s tea. French-style. With a bunch of sugar. Sugar for shock, right?”
“Actually, I never need an excuse to use sugar, but that’ll do.”
The kitchen was mostly copper and blue, with white trim. There was no dishwasher, and no place for one, she noticed with shock. The sink was messy, but cleaned fairly recently, and the counter just looked typical of a guy, dishes reproducing since the night before. Her scrutiny kept picking up details. A small fridge, a couple bottles of unopened wine, the luxuriously sexy smell of fresh bread, a heap of fresh fruit in a bowl. The eating table only had room for two chairs, was hardly big enough to put plates on, but it overlooked the boulevard below, the whole view of thick, old trees, the steady snake of cars and street traffic. Sunlight ribboned through fresh green leaves.
“Ever since I got here,” she murmured, “I keep seeing the same things I could see at home. Cars. People. Buildings. Spring flowers and smells. But somehow it’s incredibly different.”
“It’s Paris,” he said, as if that explained everything.
And maybe it did. Heaven knows her response to Will was unlike her response to any other stranger. She couldn’t seem to pin down a reason. Maybe being mugged had just thrown her normal reactions off-kilter. Maybe shock and fear just made her senses more acute, inflamed her emotions.
And maybe burning her tongue on the hot tea would distract her from these idiotic thoughts about him.
“Better,” she pronounced, after she gulped down three long sips of the strong brew.
He leaned against the counter. “Okay, I figure we’d better organize a plan of attack here. Obviously the first priority is getting you a new passport. Somewhere, do you have your original passport number, and other ID like a birth certificate or driver’s license?”
“Well, I did have. But that stuff was all in my purse.”
“Okay. But did you leave that kind of information with someone back home? Like a copy of your passport?”
She nodded. “I left some obvious information in an envelope with my mom—the address where I’d be staying, copies of credit cards, a copy of my birth certificate. I’ve never traveled outside the country before. It didn’t occur to me that I’d need to do more than that.”
“Normally, you wouldn’t. So the first thing you want to do is call your mom, get her to fax that information here. By then we should have the police report. That’s the stuff we need to take to the consulate, get the process going to get you an immediate temporary passport.”
She frowned. “Temporary?”
“Well, if you want a regular passport, it’ll take a while. The bureaucracy here is no faster than it is in the United States. But you can fly home right away with a temporary, no waiting or hassle.”
“And that would be great,” she said slowly, “but I don’t want to go home immediately. Will, it wasn’t my fault this happened. And I didn’t come here on a whim. I’ve waited a long time for a chance to make this trip.”
“Okay…well…” For a long moment, he studied her, as if suddenly realizing she hadn’t come here to Paris just to do the tourist thing. “The way you’d attack a new permanent passport takes basically the same steps. Get the ID records, then the police report, then go to the consulate. If I remember right, a regular replacement passport’ll cost you around eighty-five, ninety bucks. But I’d be amazed if the paperwork went through for that in less than two weeks, and it could take longer.”
“But as long as I could get money wired here, replacement credit cards and all that, there’s no reason I couldn’t stay?”
“I’m no expert, Kelly, but my understanding is that, yes, you’d be fine as long as you stayed in France. It’d probably be pretty dicey to leave the country without an active passport in your hand.”
“That’s okay. This is the only place I wanted to come to.” When she swallowed the last sip of tea, she realized that the adrenaline had quit pumping; the shakes had disappeared. Talking to Will, being with Will, she’d forgotten the mugger. Yet, when she met his eyes, her heart rate still seemed determined to heat to an edgy simmer. “You know a lot about this,” she said.
“Not a lot. But I lost a passport once. And I’ve been living in Paris for the last four years, so naturally I’ve learned a few survival tricks.” He shot her to Will a wry grin. “You can take it to the bank—from replacing credit cards to getting money wired to getting the cop report and the application, you’re going to learn a whole bunch of French swearwords over the next couple days.”
She chuckled, but she thought it was about time to stop gazing into those sexy blue eyes and move her butt. For Pete’s sake, right now she didn’t have a brush or deodorant or even the means to buy herself lunch.
Will had been a hero, but he certainly owed her nothing. He’d already gone the long mile to help her out. “Okay,” she said brightly. “If you’d just let me use your phone…”
He gave her a look she didn’t understand. Then he steered her into the room with the balconies and the high tin ceilings, handed her a phone and left.
She appreciated the privacy. But twenty minutes later, she was pretty close to curling up in a ball under a couch. Any couch.
Will showed up in the doorway. “Not doing too great?”
She sighed. “I couldn’t seem to make a direct connection, so I had to use an operator. She didn’t speak much English. Or want to.”
“Yeah. You’re in France.”
“Got past that. But my mom wasn’t home. I tried her landline, her cell. Twice. Left messages. Twice.”
“Okay.” He scratched his chin. “I thought you said you had a fiancé.”
She straightened. “I do.”
He looked at her. She wasn’t sure what he was thinking, why a sudden silence fell
